A puppy abandoned on the Las Vegas streets found instant luck when she wandered straight to the side gate of an avid dog lover - a woman who also happens to have a surveillance camera affixed to her house, which taped an SUV driver dumping the dog and driving away.
Graci, a mixed-breed lab, is seen following the SUV for several feet and appearing confused.
“Graci seemed like she was saying, ‘Please, give me another chance!’ I just can’t believe somebody could do that,” said Toni Luisi, who discovered the puppy at her gate when she let her own two dogs out of the house at about 5:30 a.m. on May 4. Given her existing pair of pooches, Luisi launched an email address – GraciThePuppy@yahoo.com - to find the puppy the best possible home.
Public outrage over the dumped pup fueled an email storm to Luisi's email box - a barrage of ticked dog aficionados "expressing their anger" while making their own case for adoption, Luisi told NBC News. Many of the emailers promised sprawling yards and kids or other dogs to romp with Graci.
“We brought her immediately to the vet to see if she was chipped (with an embedded identification marker),” Luisi said. The dog was deemed a healthy 38 pounds and estimated to be about 6 months old. But she had no chip and no collar. Luisi nicknamed her Graci as a short version of “for the grace of God.”
Curious, Luisi checked her home-surveillance footage and realized that even if Graci had been chipped, her previous owners clearly didn’t want her. The video shows an SUV slowly stopping in front of Luisi’s house. Graci emerges from the car and the SUV exits. No license plate can be seen in the footage.
“With all of the people emailing, it’s not going to be easy to choose a new home for her. But one of the emails was from a woman who said her son is a cancer survivor and he would love Graci as his pet. It brought tears to my eyes. I’m going to call her,” Luisi said. “That got my heart.”
Dog abandonment is a fineable, misdemeanor crime in Las Vegas.
“After we find her a home, I hope we can find these people,” she said. “I want them to get retribution and to pay the fine.”
